A brand new scholarship for Valley Excessive Faculty seniors will honor Kaylee Xiong, a gifted graphic design scholar who was killed in a South Sacramento crash final September. She was 18.
Brandy Shearer, who taught Xiong, is elevating $10,000 for the Kaylee Xiong Memorial Scholarship. Shearer stated a bunch of scholar leaders in this system spearheaded the plan to award $1,000 yearly to a Valley Excessive senior who has accomplished the college’s collection of graphic design lessons. Anybody can donate to the scholarship on-line at daring.org.
Shearer stated her college students got here up with the concept as a neighborhood service mission. A lot of the college students within the management group are juniors and seniors who knew Xiong.
“She was actually well-loved,” Shearer stated. “She was at all times standing up for youths, too. If she noticed one thing, she would say one thing.”
Xiong was driving an electrical scooter house from the sunshine rail station on Franklin Boulevard close to Cosumnes River Boulevard just a little after 6 p.m. Sept. 4, 2024, when she was fatally struck by the motive force of a Kia Optima. She graduated from Valley Excessive in 2024, and, on the time of her dying, had simply began her first semester at Sacramento State.
Deadly automobile crash was a part of a sample in Sacramento
Xiong died on town’s “high-injury community” — these metropolis streets the place the best numbers of extreme and deadly crashes happen. Sacramento recognized this community as a part of its Imaginative and prescient Zero efforts. The overwhelming majority of extreme crashes are preventable with modifications to infrastructure, and the Metropolis Council made a Imaginative and prescient Zero pledge in 2017 to remove all site visitors fatalities and critical accidents by 2027.
Though town isn’t on observe to satisfy the council’s objective, the Division of Public Works proposed a “quick-build” program final month that might fast-track smaller-scale security tasks. Such a program might make a dent in Sacramento’s rising dying toll.
The collision that killed Xiong was considered one of 32 deadly crashes The Sacramento Bee lined in 2024. To this point, at the very least three folks have died in car crashes on metropolis streets this yr: Najah Islam, 30; Jonathon T. Slaugh, 62; and Adrienne Keyana Johnson, 33. The overwhelming majority of those 35 lethal crashes since 2024 have killed individuals who, like Xiong, weren’t in automobiles. Out of the 35 lifeless, 22 have been pedestrians or cyclists, and two have been driving electrical scooters.
Xiong’s father, Johnny Vang, didn’t reply to a request for a touch upon the scholarship, however Shearer stated on-line that Xiong’s household deliberate to match the primary $1,000 in donations.
Xiong was ‘sensible, pushed and aggressive’
Xiong was born April 19, 2006. As a highschool scholar, Shearer wrote, she “set extremely excessive requirements for herself.” Xiong “was sensible, pushed and aggressive — but in addition knew precisely when to take it straightforward and benefit from the second.”
After graduating, she started learning graphic design at Sacramento State, the place her older brother, Nicholas Xiong, was additionally a scholar. Neng Yang, Xiong’s mom, instructed the school paper that her teenage daughter was artful and conjured stunning rose bouquets out of satin. The little sister Xiong cherished to play with, Harperlynn, turned 1 in October, two months after {the teenager}’s dying.
Shearer stated that Xiong used to linger by her desk at Valley Excessive Faculty and exhibit images of the newborn woman.
“Kaylee made the world a brighter place,” Shearer wrote, and each donation to the scholarship, “will assist create alternatives for college students who, like Kaylee, dream large and love deeply.”
